Erase that war with China 'in 2014'

Erase that war with China 'in 2014'
By Peter Lee

At the end of 2011, in an article on this site titled "Maybe that war with China isn't so far off after all", I drew that gloomy conclusion because the United States, thanks to the justifications, excuses, and pretexts surrounding its desire to "pivot to Asia", had created the doctrinal and public relations




justification and institutional incentives for military hostilities with the PRC. [1]

The slowly developing pivot has certainly created problems for the People's Republic in 2013, energizing its antagonists, marginalizing its supporters, and turning China's search for advantage in its East Asian environment into a grinding, costly slog, marked by incessant friction between Japan and China, the escalating defiance of the Philippines, and the alarming emergence of India as Japan's explicit security partner.

Despite talk of a "new model" of US-China relations, the new regime of Xi Jinping has not hit many of the conciliatory marks that the United States pointedly set for it (and, in the case of Syria, its resistance to the Obama administration's policies have been rather clearly vindicated).

In East Asia, China continues to claim objectionable security prerogatives, particularly in its maritime zone. Western elite opinion is set against the country as an assertive, uncooperative, and disturbing force - witness the media uproar against the PRC for failing to supply the level of typhoon aid to the Philippines that might validate China's legitimacy as a benign regional power, at least in the eyes of the West - and the outlook for 2014 is more complaints and more coercion.

Increasingly, this attitude manifests itself as the assertion in the Western public sphere that US relations with the PRC are veering from the model of peaceful competition to an existential good versus evil cage match. This is demonstrably not the opinion in PRC pundit-land, nor does it seem to be the case when considering the actual application of US pivot policy. In fact, a closer reading of the events of 2013 imply that there are more pressing and productive priorities for the US in Asia than teeing up World War III.

The general trend in 2013 was to nibble away at the PRC's weak points in relatively peaceful, economic-centric ways, and shy away from the genuine fire-eating confrontations that might cause an armed clash and upset the shaky global economic applecart.

The new trend was typified by US engagement with Myanmar. The Myanmar junta, aware that its wholesale reliance on the unpopular PRC presence was pushing it into a political and economic cul de sac, reached out to the United States in 2011 by postponing the Myitsone dam, a high-profile PRC-funded hydro project, and by negotiating an accommodation on political reform with Aung San Suu Kyi. (If executed uncle and pro-Beijing asset in Pyongyang Jang Song-thaek turns out to be North Korea's Myitsone Dam, we may be in for an interesting year of awkward US-DPRK outreach on the Korean peninsula as well).

The United States also exploited fears of the Chinese boogeyman to push its "Trans Pacific Partnership", a trade pact that is perhaps more significant for the sovereignty-eroding giveaway it represents for global corporate interests than as an engine of economic growth or weapon for China-bashing. The TPP got a big boost, at least politically, through the Shinzo Abe government's determination to push Japan into the pact. Pragmatic Asian powers also jumped on the bandwagon, while declaring conditional and partial allegiance to the PRC-sponsored alternative: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP.

In response, the PRC even expressed an interest to join the TPP itself (certainly to block Japan's efforts to use the TPP to secure its anti-China economic alliance and possibly in order to treat the pact seriously as cover for domestic economic reforms) which would certainly dilute the pact's China-bashing panache.

The biggest setback for the United States was l'affaire Edward Snowden, which scuppered the US effort to lead the discussions of the world's economic agenda with China - and deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by the retirement of that old warhorse, yuan undervaluation, paired with the concurrent US attempt to weaken its currency through quantitative easing - by depicting the PRC as a cyber-gangster who had stolen its way to prosperity by filching American secrets, so completely that some observers declared that Snowden was actually a Chinese agent.

Nevertheless, the successful US effort to deny the PRC a legitimate regional and global voice chugged on, in the form of the "assertive China threat" narrative supported by the PRC's highhandedness in the South China Sea, particularly with the incensed Philippine government, further fueled by the media vaporings over the PRC's declaration in November of an air defense intelligence zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea, and advanced more systematically by the increasingly independent Shinzo Abe and the cycle of provocations that Japan and the PRC cautiously execute around the disputed Senkaku Islands.

Abe took advantage of US forbearance to stick his finger in the Senkaku sore and use the resulting Chinese squeals as cover for his agenda of remilitarizing Japan's global presence through security cooperation with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, and - somewhat further afield - Turkey. (I patiently await the discovery by an alarmed and aroused Western media that Japan, thanks to its enormous stock of plutonium metal and its otherwise useless space program, is a threshold nuclear weapons power. As to the canard that metal recovered from spent reactor fuel cannot be used in nuclear weapons, I direct the interested reader here.)

At the same time, the PRC encouraged the Senkaku friction with its own calculated affronts, including announcement of the ADIZ to cover the islands. In addition to "slicing the salami" with incremental assertions of its maritime position, the PRC appears to be implementing a strategy quite similar to the North Korean program of calculated aggravation, trying to lure the United States into taking a constructive position between Japan and China to resolve the issue.

The United States has not risen to the bait and has explicitly reaffirmed the coverage of the Senkakus in the US-Japan Defense Treaty (a position that, I never tire of pointing out, [2] the Obama administration was poised to abandon in 2010 just before the miraculous event of the detention by Japan of Chinese fishing-boat captain Zhan Qixiong triggered Chinese reprisals and forced the US to side with Japan), thereby enabling the "China threat" narrative that forms the cornerstone of Shinzo Abe's efforts to redefine Japan's place in Asia, reinvigorate the Japanese economy, and build a network of regional alliances keystoned by India, Vietnam, and the Philippines as a complement to US backing.

More subtly, Prime Minister Abe took advantage of the defiance of the Chinese ADIZ by US military aircraft (an oft-asserted and exclusive right of the world's military hegemon certainly not reciprocally extended to any foreign power approaching the US) to claim the same privilege for Japanese aircraft, thereby virtually guaranteeing that if and when the South China Sea's ADIZ number comes up, everybody will be asserting the same right to fly their military aircraft wherever they want.

If the goal is to render any South China Sea ADIZ moot and thwart the PRC's regional pretensions, success is at hand. If, on the other hand, one would prefer that the purpose and utility of an ADIZ was respected and countries would not fly their military aircraft through other people's sensitive airspace without filing flight plans and talking on the radio, creating a regional ADIZ-defying regime is perhaps not the happy high road to aviation safety and avoidance of the dread "accidents and misunderstandings" that otherwise obsess anxious observers of the frictions in China's maritime near-beyond.

The purpose of the pivot, as it was originally presented, was not to stick it to the PRC for the sake of pure pleasure (albeit a pleasure that some pundits and politicians yearn to taste again and again and find almost fatally addictive); the threat and exercise of the pivot were intended to redirect Chinese behavior into avenues more advantageous to the United States.

Middle East again, but further east
By this metric, US success has been more equivocal. The pivot has modified the PRC's behavior, but indirectly, in response to regional forces unleashed by the pivot, and in ways that do not redound automatically to the benefit of the United States. The pivot to Asia threatens to replicate the US adventure in the Middle East, where US policy was very much in thrall to local allies - Israel, Saudi Arabia - that influenced and sometimes drove US regional policy into places the United States really didn't want to go.

This situation threatens to replicate itself in US relations with Japan. Prime Minister Abe enjoys remarkably good press in the United States, which is perhaps a tribute both to the energy his government puts into public relations and the considerable slack that Japan gets cut as an Asian democracy and US ally. However, it should be recalled that Abe is:

a) an old-school imperial nationalist;
b) a historical revisionist deeply resentful of the framing of the Pacific War as the virtuous US versus evil Japan (and, for that matter, innocent, victimized China); and
c) has first-hand bitter experience of the unreliability of US government support when the George W Bush administration threw him under the bus on the abductees issue in its rush to make a deal with North Korea during Abe's first term as prime minister in 2007.

Abe's desire to have Japan master of its own fate - in defense, security, and foreign policy - is not just a matter of his nationalistic preoccupation with the Chinese threat. It reflects his desire to transform Japan's relations with the United States from subservient ally to independent peer - and potential tail wagging the dog.

The PRC government has continually pounded on the issue of the divergence between the Asian visions of the Abe administration and the United States. Outgoing PRC premier Wen Jiabao made an unlikely visit to Germany to praise the Postdam Declaration (which called for unconditional surrender of Japan to the United States and its allies - including Chiang Kai-shek's China - in World War II) as the enduring foundation of the Asian security order.

PRC affirmations of the crucial US security role in East Asia have not mollified Western public critics, perhaps since the PRC has combined endorsement of the general principle with its irritating bullying of the Philippines and Vietnam, and most recently, the arousing the US Navy's indignation with its interference with US surveillance of the Chinese navy's aircraft carrier Liaoning in international waters.

But it appears that understanding of the PRC position - and the additional leverage it offers US diplomacy - has quietly found its way into US China policy.

One could say that in 2013 the US tiptoed to the edge of the abyss, looked in, realized it contained some bad things - such as Shinzo Abe calling the Asia shots instead of President Obama - in addition to the seductive mirage of liberal democratic triumph, and is learning to live with a new status quo of managed hostility and cautious opportunism.

Unexpectedly, the US China brief found its way into the reassuring hands of John Kerry, while new National Security Advisor Susan Rice was given ample leisure to reflect upon the miserable outcomes in Libya and Syria that her campaigns of confrontation (and anti-Chinese and anti-Russian vituperation) at the UN had yielded.

The United States government held Japan in check by reiterating its neutrality on the Senkakus sovereignty issue (a position that China hawks are pressing it to abandon) and refusing to replicate Japan's orders to its airlines to defy the East China Sea ADIZ (in one of those little-noted developments, South Korea decided to honor the Chinese ADIZ once its own ADIZ extension had been successfully announced, leaving Japan as the only country in the world whose civil airliners refuse to respect the Chinese air defense identification zone).

Secretary of State Kerry's pre-emptive harrumphing on the inadvisability of a PRC ADIZ declaration in the South China Sea, delivered in Vietnam with the concurrent announcement of increased maritime security assistance to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, appears to represent the US attempt to be ahead of the curve (and ahead of the determinedly confrontational Philippines) in the South China Sea, instead of reacting to the PRC and Japan as it did in the East China Sea ADIZ fracas.

The fact of moderation beneath the veneer of extreme rhetoric on both sides seems lost on the Western media, perhaps thanks to the PRC's decision under new supremo Xi Jinping to abandon the futile soft-power stylings of his predecessor Hu Jintao and crack down on the media.

PRC President Xi apparently decided that his plans for securing power and advancing his agenda, reform and otherwise, involved tight controls over dissent and the media, foreign as well as domestic. Fruitlessly currying favor with the Western corporate media is not on Xi's to-do list. Reducing the space for news outlets to discover and propagate information embarrassing to the regime and deleterious to its prestige and authority, on the other hand, clearly is.

Western journalists in Beijing and their employers have been subjected to a barrage of harassment, exemplified by the government declining to renew visas for Bloomberg and New York Times in a timely manner in retaliation for their temerity in reporting on the corrupt wellsprings of the immense wealth enjoyed by the PRC's leading families and individuals.

It seems that this aggravating state of affairs has caused some journalists to conflate the travails of Western media organizations in China with an overall Chinese agenda of confrontation with the West.

There are certain rumblings in the China-watching side of the Internet that we are entering an era of containment, with invocations of George Kennan's doctrine of containment against the Soviet Union presented in his seminal 1947 essay, "The Sources of Soviet Power".

Kennan's containment theory drew its strength - and America's self-satisfying posture of moral superiority - from the idea that the USSR was a failed system that couldn't handle the truth. Unable to face up to its political, social, and moral failings, the USSR would instead dishonestly define the West as its hostile, active enemy, wall itself up within its nasty communist Iron Curtain, and eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

At the popular level, the Cold War containment analogy is a tribute to the heroic ability of people in the West to forget the erosion of US hegemony over the last 20 years and turn their



thoughts to the infinitely more gratifying vision of the PRC falling on its ass for the same reasons that the USSR did.

In the case of the People's Republic of China, which has done rather well for itself over the last 25 years - and has increasingly integrated itself into the West-led capitalist economy - the containment framing looks mistaken, both as an explanation for China's behavior and as a justification for Western policy. The PRC renounced war on the West and on capitalism when Mao withdraw support for communist struggles in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War and invited Nixon to China. Deng Xiaoping threw North Korea under the bus by normalizing relations with South Korea.

The PRC's response to the slide of Myanmar toward the Western camp has been to step up diplomatic and economic engagement, not to recapitulate the Warsaw Pact invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And the last war that China fought - the 1979 incursion into Vietnam (only one war in the last 35 years? What kind of great power is that?) - was a joint project of the US and the PRC to balk the Soviet Union's push into Southeast Asia.

In 2013, if anybody is trying to use the threat of an alien system and an implacable enemy to revitalize national and security doctrines challenged by disturbing national and global trends in the way Kennan envisioned, it's not the People's Republic of China. Interested observers would be advised to look (*cough* Japan *cough* United States *cough*) elsewhere.

Xi Jinping's PRC doesn't want to confront the West - it wants to do business with it and to minimize disruptions as the Chinese leadership wrestles with its large and intractable domestic economic and social problems. In foreign affairs, the PRC if anything wants the United States as an ally, or at least a sympathetic participant, in its effort to create a new security tripod that somehow incorporates the PRC, the US, and China's increasingly hated rival Japan, into an advantageous regional security and economic framework.

It will be interesting to see if in 2014 Xi decides to follow through on some vague rumblings in the Chinese press and bids farewell once and for all to the archaic nine-dash-line that delineates its claims in the South China Sea, in order to regularize the situation there and put maritime relations with ASEAN on a truly modern footing.

It can be argued that the key feature of the world in 2013 is not the bifurcation of into Chinese and anti-Chinese camps. Chinese foreign policy and diplomacy are still largely driven by its desire to avoid isolation before the West and dilute the polarizing power of "the pivot to Asia".

A better model for China, and arguably for relations in Asia, instead of Soviet-style containment, might be "Balance of Power", the arrangement that kept hostile nations in Europe at peace for several decades until the whole edifice came crashing down in World War I.

Given the PRC's interest in solving its extremely vexing domestic problems - and, I think, awareness that xenophobic nationalism directed at Japan might offer some political breathing space but a war in East Asia will only serve to exacerbate China's difficulties - the next few years will see it try to avoid the cathartic Good versus Evil confrontation that China-bashers long for.

Pivot 2.0
As long as the PRC is an authoritarian state, the West will presumably never completely abandon the rhetoric of containment. But the emerging reality might be something different - and beneficial to the United States and the overall security order in Asia.

Pivot 2.0 might not involve roiling Asian security in order to forestall Chinese regional hegemony from supplanting US preeminence; instead it might involve acceptance of a shift toward military parity within the region as burgeoning economies, threat perception (and inflation), and the desire for independence in security policy drive defense spending of all the Asian countries. At the same time, economic interrelatedness of the various antagonistic parties would hopefully heighten awareness of the dangers to all sides of unbalanced reliance on the military/security narrative.

If things break the Chinese way, the United States will respond to its evolving role in Asia to play the honest broker and counterbalancer-in-chief, instead of clinging to its role as my-way-or-the-highway hyperpower lawgiver-in-chief on behalf of the Asian democracies confronting China.

Of course, things might not break the Chinese way, a not unlikely scenario since the current generation of US leaders lacks the doctrine, experience, skills, or inclination to function effectively in an environment that demands more than the determined exercise of hegemony.

And, unfortunately for America's allies as well as its enemies, the US track record as the practitioner of hegemony is decidedly mixed.

That the United States is the responsible, omni-competent steward of the world's freedom and prosperity is a pleasing assumption that Washington does nothing to dispel. Indeed, this sunny view provides the much of the underlying justification for the assertion that the US "pivot to Asia" will make things much, much better for everybody, instead of recapitulating the three decades of misery that the United States has helped perpetuate in the previous focus of its attention and abilities, the Middle East.

For a worst-case look at what the United States could inflict on Asia, consider the presidency of George W Bush.

Thanks to the unexpected appearance of a Middle East quagmire beneath the carpet of rose petals scattered for Iraq's American liberators, the Bush administration did not have much opportunity for Asian mischief.

However, countering the China threat was a touchstone for vice president Dick Cheney, who considered the application of a chokehold to the PRC's energy supplies an important justification for the adventure in Iraq. His allies in the Department of Defense were not afraid to play the Taiwan card and with it the promise of more creative destruction in East Asia.

In 2007, Congressional Quarterly relayed the recollections of former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, concerning the neo-conservative perspective on Taiwan independence:

    The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] [defense secretary] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week ... essentially to tell [president at the time, from the Democratic Progressive Party] Chen Shui-bian ... that independence was a good thing.

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy "right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they'd been told by the Defense Department".

"This went on," he said of the pro-independence efforts, "until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China."

The head of the American Institute in Taiwan in this period was Theresa Sheehan, who was married to Larry DeRita, Donald Rumsfeld's chief press flack at the Pentagon. She used her bully pulpit to push for Taiwan independence and support the credibility of the Department of Defense approach until Colin Powell demanded her resignation and she was removed.

For those that draw reassurance from the fact that Cheney is now out of office, recall that the evil that men do lives on…

Even after the various foreign policy and political debacles of president Bush's second term had discredited Cheney's aggressive foreign policy posture, the vice president shrugged off Condoleezza Rice's attempts to assert control over US foreign policy and embarked on a "going rogue" tour to rally support for a confrontational anti-PRC alliance of Japan, India, Australia, and the United States in 2007.

Shinzo Abe, in his brief first prime ministership, was the receptive focus of Mr Cheney's attentions. He enthusiastically endorsed the four-way "diamond" containment policy, made it the centerpiece of his Asian strategy, and has sought to implement it with a major security outreach to India during his current term.

With this background, one of the most significant metrics for mischief in Asia is the political situation in Taiwan and in particular the unpopularity of the Republic of China's determinedly pro-mainland President Ma Ying-jeou. As a November 13 item from the Taipei Times tells us, he has been unable to spin any political gold out of his tilt toward Beijing:

    The poll, conducted from Tuesday to Thursday, found that just 15.5 percent of respondents approved of Ma's performance, the lowest since the think tank began conducting a bi-monthly poll in March last year. His disapproval rating also hit a record high of 75.9 percent. [3]

If Ma is unable to turn things his way, the independence-minded Democratic People's Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Su Tseng-chang, will be in the driver's seat in 2017. Su cultivates ties to Japanese ultra-nationalist Shintaro Ishihara as a counterweight to the Kuomintang romance with Beijing and is quite possibly mulling endorsement of Japan's claim to the Senkakus as part of his strategy of realignment.

If the DPP takes power, Prime Minister Abe continues his productive meddling in regional geopolitics and the PRC continues to get the back up of its neighbors with its maritime policies, then forbearance of the United States becomes more important in coping with a destabilizing scenario of a successful Taiwan independence referendum with Japanese backing.

In that case, the PRC is faced with either accepting a huge knock on its prestige and power or pushing the war button. [4]

If Taiwan moves toward independence, the United States is not faced with a comfortable containment model, where the United States and its allies are slapping the snout of a Chinese dragon trying to intrude into regions beyond those considered right and proper. Instead, it will be dealing with an overt repudiation of the one-China system, major disruption to the regional balance of power, and the need to push back against an angry adversary driven by irredentist sentiment, nationalism, and a sense of existential threat.

That is a situation that I believe the Obama administration is not keen to find itself in. But the Obama administration will not be in power in 2017.

I think that the politicians today have the foresight not to roll the dice on war in Asia. But, as they say, past results are no guarantee of future performance. No war in 2014. But 2017? I wouldn't take any bets right now.

Note:
1. Maybe that war with China isn't so far off after all, Asia Times Online, December 22, 2011.
2. Japan spins anti-China merry-go-round, Asia Times Online, October 29, 2010.
3. Ma’s rating hits rock bottom: poll, Taipei Times, November 9, 2013.
4. DPP chairman risks Beijing backlash by meeting Ishihara, South China Morning Post, February 3, 2013.

Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.

(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Asia Times Online :: Secret information: The currency of power

Asia Times Online :: Secret information: The currency of power

 Page 1 of 5
Secret information: The currency of power
By Lars Schall

The transcript of the following interview was exclusively arranged for Asia Times Online. An audio file of the interview is published at the German financial web site "Die Metallwoche" here.

Thomas Drake, born 1957, is a former senior executive at the US National Security Agency who blew the whistle on a multi-billion dollar program fraud and cover up as well as the NSA's secret unlawful surveillance program. The US Department of

Justice prosecuted and indicted him under the World War I-era Espionage Act in April, 2010, under 10 felony counts including that he "mishandled documents". The case against him ultimately collapsed. He eventually pled to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer. He is a former airborne crypto-linguist and electronic warfare mission crew supervisor. From 1991-1998 he worked at Booz Allen Hamilton as a management, strategy and technology consultant and software quality engineer. In 2011, Drake became the recipient of the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Award. He holds a Bachelor's and two Master's degrees as well as numerous graduate certificates.

Lars Schall: Thomas, the first question that I would have for you is, why did you a) join the Signal Intelligence Directorate of the US National Security Agency in late summer 2001; and b) leave the NSA in 2008?

Thomas Drake: Well, between those two dates a lot happened. I joined NSA in 2001 as a result of a special outside hiring program that was led by then director Michael Hayden, a director of NSA during the 2000 period. There had been a lot of pressure even in the late '90s. The NSA was growing increasingly irrelevant and having great difficulty keeping up with the challenges of the digital age, and a number of stakeholders, particularly Congress, began placing a lot of pressure on NSA to hire outsiders - people who had not grown up at NSA, had not been promoted at NSA, people who came from other parts of government but particular came from outside of government, even if they had government experience, but people that were not embedded, as they say, in the culture - and so about a dozen of us [were ultimately hired] after going through a formal application for jobs that had actually been advertised in a number of the leading newspapers across the United States.

... I had answered an ad in the Washington Post that had been placed in February 2001. Although it was not the position I applied for, I was offered a position reporting to the number three person at NSA, who was the director of the Signals Intelligence Directorate. We call it the SIGINT Director. I began late August within processing, and my first day actually reporting to my new job was 9/11. I actually had the title Senior Change Leader and was responsible for change leadership and communications. That is 2001.

I resigned in April 2008 because I had been placed under criminal investigation for allegedly causing great damage to the security of the United States and at the time I faced what ultimately led to an indictment that was handed down on me a couple of years later. That is the short version. There is a lot happened in between.

LS: As you left the NSA in 2008 what happened to you afterwards? I mean, among other things you're one of four individuals in the history of the United States who has been charged specifically with "willful retention" of "national defense information".

TD: Well, it's actually under US Criminal Code, Title 18 793e of the Espionage Act of 1917, which was actually passed into law to deal with spies, not whistleblowers. The first person charged for non-spy activities under the Espionage Act and that particular paragraph was Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame; I was the second whistleblower charged in like manner. There were/are a couple of others earlier who had been charged under the same title 18 statute. It had been quite rare in US history for an American to be charged with espionage for "mishandling national defense information". It is very unusual and it's one of the worst names you can paint an American with. You're actually placed into the same category as the real spies in US history, particular referring to the post-World War II era - the Alder James, Alger Hisses and Robert Hanssens of the world; it places you and paints you into a very dark corner and they have the label and moniker painted on you of espionage, [which] means that you've done something really, really bad, and at best you're a traitor and at worst you're an enemy of the state.

Now, this is 2008 and I had already been raided the previous fall by the FBI as part of a much larger national security investigation, a criminal league investigation, and I had become a target. I actually had become a target starting in 2006, and I knew that the nightmare had only begun. So, my entire career was gone, and I was going to have to deal with whatever the government was going to meet out in terms of its attempt to punish me severely, which meant the distinct possibility that ... an indictment will be handed down on me and that's precisely what happened a couple of years later. [To cut a] long story short, I ended up being indicted with a ten felony count [and] facing 35 years in prison. Five of the felony counts were for espionage, one was for obstruction of justice and four additional felony counts were for making false statements to FBI agents.

LS: What's the attitude of national intelligence community towards whistle-blowing in general?

TD: Let's just say whistle-blowing is not something that goes over too well, particularly in a national security arena. Even in terms of culture, whistle-blowing tends to have a negative connotation. You're considered a rat or a fink or a tattletale, and you're making the group and the institution look bad even if what you're blowing the whistle on reveals government wrong-doing and illegality or even embarrassment or threats to public safety and health, which is essentially the definition of whistle-blowing - it's all done in the public interest.

In the national security arena, you're supposed to keep the secrets, and although non-disclosure agreements that I had signed over a number of years obligated me to protect legitimately classified information, whistle-blowing in that security space was considered a violation, culturally a violation of the group norms that you remain silent even in the face of wrong-doing, and so it's fraught with peril but in particular under an Obama administration. Blowing the whistle in the national security arena has effectively become a criminal act that requires severe punishment, and it's become the norm that if you blow the whistle in the national security space then it's very likely that you will be threatened with or even charged with espionage.

As unusual as it was in terms of US history, my indictment under the Espionage Act was just the opening bell, and the number of people who followed [were] charged in like manner, and now it's become quite routine - I think we're up to eight now; eight cases in which the government has filed formal charges and also indictments ... in which the Espionage Act has a very prominent place in the felony counts.

LS: We have currently the whistle-blowing case of Edward Snowden; did you become involved in this?

TD: When you say involved, I didn't know Edward Snowden, you know he became quite prominent now as we go back almost six months, starting in the beginning of June of this year with the dramatic disclosures regarding the NSA and surveillance apparatus as well as other parts of the government and GCHQ et al. My involvement with Edward Snowden in terms of direct contact as a result of the Sam Adams Associates awarding him the 2013 Integrity and Intelligence Award, which I actually presented it to him along with Colleen Rowley, the first recipient of the award, and Jesselyn Radack, who had won the award with me a couple of years ago, and then one of the founders of Sam Adams Associates, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst. We traveled to Russia in the beginning of October to present Edward Snowden with this award for what he had done in the public interest; so that's my involvement.

I consider him a fellow NSA whistleblower. He had well learnt the realities of my ordeal as well as others; you know, standing on my shoulders and recognize that he was bringing out critical information in the public interest regarding just how far the surveillance state had penetrated the very fabric of our society on an extraordinary, truly extraordinary scale. A scale that's never been seen in human history and makes even other regimes in terms of 20th century history look almost mild by comparison in terms of just the sheer breadth and scale and the global reach of the surveillance state.

Far, far beyond its mandated purpose under even the US Constitution to provide the common defense. It's important to note 9/11 truly was a trigger event, but the foundation for the nation security state actually began, for the United States, shortly after World War II with the National Security Act. It was the first time in US history that we ended up having essentially, you know, standing arms of standing intelligence agencies that were made permanent.

LS: Has Mr Snowden done in your view the right thing?

TD: Actually yes. If the discussions and the debate and conversation, the sustained debates and conversations are any proof of that we just have to look back over the last five-plus months. This is something that we never had regarding what's at stake for the sovereignty of individuals when you have such a surveillance apparatus involved and deeply embedded in so many aspects of society, and what does it mean for who we are as human beings in our culture. I well recognize that you know spying between nations and people is something that's quite part of the human experience and some have said it's the world's second-oldest profession, to put it that way.

So, keeping track of other people and or wanting to know what other people are up to is certainly part of our common human heritage, but this is truly, with advances in technology, something that people have warned about over the years. Whether you listen to the farewell address of Dwight D Eisenhower as he was leaving office, warning the nation in 1961 about the military industrial complex, or the severe abuses that people often forget about in terms of US history in which instruments of national power were actually turned on thousands of people within the United States during the '60s and '70s, culminating in all the revelations under the Nixon administration - history is not kind here at all.

So yes, I believe it was fully within the public interest and he knew that disclosing the extent of the surveillance state as it had metastasized over the intervening 12 years since 9/11 would put his life in extraordinary peril, and he had to escape the United States in order to have any chance of keeping his freedom let along making the disclosures he did to certain reporters and journalists.

LS: Are you satisfied with regards to the coverage of that ongoing story in Western mainstream media?

TD: I wouldn't say I'm satisfied if my own experience and others that I'm closely aligned with in this space - fellow whistleblowers and advocates and activists as well as other reporters and journalists - is any indication. ... The international press is actually and continues to take a far greater interest in terms of what's at stake and what this means to have such extraordinary surveillance, you know, penetrating every aspect, practically every aspect of our lives.

The United States mainstream media - although they are beginning to wake up regarding the extent of the surveillance state and what it means in the secrecy regime - have been quite muted, and still you see certain reporting journalists almost serving as apologists for the administration, arguing their case as it were on the pages of the main newspapers, whether it's online, digital or in print.

But what I am encouraged by is the fact that articles are continuing to discuss other revelations, the import of those regulations and what it means for the future and I think there is what I call the second and third order effects - meaning that there are now other reporters and investigative journalists who are now digging deep into other aspects of this even beyond the continuing disclosures from Edward Snowden and are discovering a number of other areas that are causing trouble in terms of just how far the United States have gone under the excuse and mantle of 9/11. Somehow in order to make us all feel safe, in order to secure the nation we essentially have to seize all information that we can get our hands on, whether it's directly, indirectly or through arrangements with companies because it's the zero-sum game.

 It's the "what if" scenario that if there's any chance and if it's only a 0.0004% [chance], "Well, you know, we'll sacrifice the 99.99% for the sake of security and if we forsake some liberties and rights and freedoms along the way so be it because the price is worth it." I think what you're seeing is that people are really beginning to question whether or not that price that we're paying is worth it, and you have people now really asking the question, serious questions about government perhaps and [in] many cases even asserting government has clearly over-reached its own bounds.

As much running room as we gave the government to pursue the threats - and I'm the first to acknowledge there are legitimate threats to international order and stability and the need for

partnerships and agreements between nations to blunt, stop and prevent acts against international order and stability both within nations and across nations, even trans-national threats to us, you know - there are limits. You can't just toss aside rights, freedom and liberties simply for the sake of security. One of the founding fathers in the United States, Benjamin Franklin, actually said words to that effect.

LS: Related to the recent revelations regarding the global surveillance programs of the NSA; have you seen any credible piece of evidence so far that these programs are doing any good in the so-called "war on terror"?

TD: Well, that's been the government meme for a long time, that this all to prevent that and it is true; one of the paradoxes in this space is that most of the intelligence operations and activities are covered, or take place under the cover of secrecy and many of those for completely legitimate reasons. I used to be part of those operations myself both during the Cold War and after in terms of my own government career - in the military, air force and navy respectively, as well as my time with the CIA, and of course my knowledge when I was a senior executive at NSA. I will be the first to tell you that the extraordinary efforts on the part of people I used to work with have in fact prevented threats or blunted threats or have exposed threats.

But here's the thing, and I will give you a more recent example. If you go back to the summer, there is testimony that was given by General Alexander, the director of NSA and the commander of the cyber command. He himself and they actually had a public release - 54 terrorist events were detected, exposed by these secret surveillance programs. Well, it turns out, and this is more recent testimony, that when under questioning before Congress in a public hearing, he could only ultimately admit to one. One that might have been exposed, and that was the al Shabaab, the several thousand and eight thousand dollars plus that was wired to al Shabaab in Somalia in terms of "material support". There's even an open question as to whether that could have been detected by traditional law enforcement means, again the zero-sum game.

LS: Recently Al Jazeera America published the talking points of the NSA related to the revelations by Edward Snowden, and very prominent was the talking point related to 9/11. [1] What's your comment on this?

TD: Invoking 9/11 as the specter, continuing to roll out the fear mongering that is engendered when 9/11 is mentioned, and using that as justification for ensuring the continuance of these programs just in case. We have to remember 9/11 was a systemic failure of the United States government - under the preamble to the Constitution, its two primary purposes are 1) to provide for the common defense and 2) to provide for the general welfare. Well, it utterly fails in terms of the former, providing for the common defense.

We do, we sometimes forget that, and so that failure is [the] trigger [for] this vast, vast set of activities and operations and surveillance as well as any number of other secret operations - the extent of which we don't fully know to this day; many of them still remain in extremely dark shadows all because of 9/11 that somehow this "existential threat" as a result of what happened on 9/11 means that we have use all means necessary. The very thing that former vice-president Cheney said was, five days after 9/11, on September 16, 2001, "We're going to have to go to the dark side." I don't think people fully appreciated what that meant.

The United States has invested, and when I say invested it's in quotes, but it has spent literally trillions of dollars, when you sum up the totals over the last 12 years, related to national defense, national security, intelligence, homeland security. It's just an extraordinary redistribution of US treasury and wealth to "deal with an existential threat". Because it spent so much money it becomes a significant flywheel. You're not going to be able to stop it very easily, and it continues to justify itself by saying we have to have America secure and we have to keep people feeling safe.

So we have 12 years of response and much of that was done in the shadows outside of any kind of public discussion or debate. It was simply done in secret, and it's the secrecy and the overreach and all the activities that go far beyond the balance of, I think, what people actually were expecting. I mean, we have to remember a lot of room was given to the government after 9/11. People understood that 9/11 happened and legitimately needed to go after the perpetrators. I'm the first to acknowledge that, but it became far more than that.

It became the excuse. It became justification for fundamentally setting aside rights and freedoms as it now turns out, not just US citizen rights that are protected under the Constitution, but also the rights and freedoms of the sovereignty of citizens in other countries as well - on a scale, again, far beyond their purpose of just dealing with threats to international stability to include terrorism, and I think what we're now seeing is people are asking the legitimate questions. "Is this a price worth paying? Do we really want to have everything being 'tracked' and 'monitored' just in case?"

Another example: for all of the powers of the surveillance apparatus even within the United States, it didn't stop the Boston Marathon bombings. There was extraordinary surveillance that had been put into place there, including large numbers of cameras. It did not stop those bombings. But what I find interesting is that usually it has the inverse effect. Meaning when there's a failure like the Boston Marathon bombings and that is not stopped although there was lots of indicators and including, ironically enough, warnings, formal warnings given to the United States by Russia regarding the Tsarnaevs - it not, it's not just taken seriously but it, because of the failure it leads to further calls and cries for even more surveillance. So, you have this sort of this interesting incentive, this pathological incentive of when there's a failure you actually [use it as] justification for even more surveillance.

I think people are really asking the question about what is it doing to who we are as a society, the corrosive effect that this has on society at large, and is the price that we're paying worth it. I think many people are beginning to answer the question that it's not. It's not worth it, and we do have to accept some risk.

There is no such thing as no risk because to say risk [free] we would have to have the perfect surveillance state, and I don't think anybody, even those who would let the government pretty much have unfettered access to almost anything, would want to go to the logical conclusion to simply let the government build the perfect surveillance state - what someone called the constant gaze upon society. History is not kind when it comes to these kinds of societies, and yet that power, that technology, is now very much in the hands of those who hold the levers of power in our country as well as others.

LS: As you have suggested the nexus 9/11 - War on Terror is also an excuse to expand programs that were existing pre-9/11, for example Echelon. [2] Could you tell us about the development of Echelon, for example, after 9/11?

TD: Well, Echelon, to be more accurate, I mean, I'm very familiar with what's called the Five Eyes community. There were long-standing agreements between the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain - we call it the Five Eyes - and the Five Eyes developed a system called Echelon which in many respects was a precursor to a worldwide linked surveillance sensing system. It had extraordinary reach based on the traditional apparatus, the surveillance security apparatus put into place to monitor many parts of the world, but we also have to remember that the era was the Cold War, but it certainly had reach into other places.

That was the foundation, and so although you don't hear people referring to Echelon by name today, clearly many follow-on programs either relied on Echelon ... or expanded upon it after 9/11. This was the system that was in place. That infrastructure that is behind Echelon did not go away. That infrastructure was certainly used and leveraged post-9/11 and in many cases for completely legitimate purposes in detecting threats to stability and order within and without nations and across nations. Very legitimate and again, some people will point to abuses, but this is one of the paradoxes of secret power.

Even when it has a legitimate purpose in providing for the common defense not just within a nation but even across nations or through agreements with other nations it is right for abuse, and there's what we call mission creep or requirements creep, that you will take on additional activities under the cover of the legitimate activities for other purposes because you can and it's in secret, and to recast a phrase from Catch 22 … the Joseph Heller novel, you know, when you have this power, who's going to stop us?

LS: I have a couple of questions regarding the use of legendary software PROMIS [Prosecutor's Management Information System], which was developed by my friend William A Hamilton, the founder of the US information technology company Inslaw Inc, and he was also a programer for NSA. Do you know anything about NSA's use of unauthorized copyright infringing copies of Inslaw's PROMIS software for at least 25 years as the software it sold to banks in support of its "follow the money" SIGINT mission?

TD: I don't have any specific knowledge of it. I am certainly aware of the program. I was not part of it. I have heard about it and am aware, had become aware of it over the years, and ... I've had people who've had the history of that program who have actually contacted me over the last couple of years. Unfortunately, it is an example - though I don't have, I can't validate or verify it - not any of the allegations or assertions, any of the history that's been revealed and disclosed regarding PROMIS, none of it surprises me and here's why. It's unfortunate but it is, and I had the direct experience at NSA that NSA would either abscond with or would cast aside really powerful technology and then use it for their own purposes.

I'll give you the example that I'm intimately familiar with, that was ThinThread, the extraordinary program in which I was the executive program manager during late 2001 and 2002 before it met a summary death at the hands of NSA leadership and placed in the Indiana Jones digital warehouse never to be seen again, in direct violation of congressional legislation signed into law to deploy ThinThread to the 18 most critical counter-terrorism sites.

Well, there's one part of ThinThread that was actually used by the secret surveillance program called Stellar Wind, the very program that I blew the whistle on - they abused that program to by-pass the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. There were many crypto-mathematician brains behind the algorithms of ThinThread and this one particular sub-program. He's actually apologized to the nation for it because he never intended that it be used in like manner. They stripped all of the protections off of it.

This pattern is unfortunate. You also have a pattern where large companies will do everything they can to ... let's say they have a company working for them, a sub-contractor. It will actually take intellectual property and then will re-package it for their own use and sell it to the government or in partnership with the government, so none of this surprises me. I just can't speak directly to the specifics of PROMIS, but I'm certainly well aware of program and what NSA did with it.

LS: Understood, but I would like to ask you, nevertheless one more question related to this. This would be, once NSA controlled the software used by banks to process wire transfers or money and letters of credit it could in theory add, delete and/or modify the amounts of funds in accounts because the funds are just data like any other kind of data. Have you ever heard that NSA or other intelligence agency exploited the banks surveillance version of PROMIS towards such an end?

TD: I've certainly heard of it, I just don't have any proof nor can I verify or validate, but I will tell you one of the aspects that has not been fully disclosed although I blew the whistle on it early on when I, within the system, had gone to key people within the government particularly congressional intelligence committees regarding Stellar Wind. One of the things that Stellar Wind did was actually without, again, without warrants, was gain direct access to financial transaction information at the bank level, credit card level, and this is extraordinary - these secret agreements were put into place regarding the flow of money.

This is shrouded in all kinds of secrecy ... but I was well aware what would that mean if there were those within the system who chose to abuse it, you know far beyond the purpose of tracking money laundering and things of that nature because this is all hidden; ... the life blood of any economy is the money, the money flows, the money deposits, the investments. I can't speak specifically to the allegations or assertions that you mentioned, but I can tell you that I would not be surprised at all that it was used in that manner given my knowledge of other abuses of information and systems that people in secret would use or have access to.

 The temptations are enormous. I come back to the fundamentals of the human condition, and temptations are enormous when you have that kind … You hear about all of these lower level stuff. We hear about contract fraud. A lot of that is all nickel and dime stuff. People just trying to rip-off the government by charging, you know $6 or something that only cost 50 cents to make.

Even beyond the contract agreements, you know this, the padding their expense accounts. Even on the part of government employees, you know there are clearly the case of people who will try to get away with things, but you're talking in a more systemic level - but I can't, again, I just want to be clear with you here and the audience, I don't have any specific knowledge regarding the

use of the PROMIS software for those purposes in terms of manipulating accounts.

LS: But do you think that intelligence information is also used by big players for insider trading, respectively informed trading?

TD: Well, see, now you're asking what I think is actually the more sensitive question, the more relevant question. Okay, information is power; it's the currency of power far more now than ever. It's always really been that way, it's just the technology greatly facilitates this?

LS: Hasn't John Negroponte said that data is worth more than money?

TD: Yes, precisely because I can convert it. In fact data is actually much more - you know they talk about money being fungible because you can convert it into so many different things, but what's behind that? How do you manage and exercise the fungibility. How do you optimize its fungibility-ness to say it that way. It's fungibleness, okay to make up a word. That's the information, that's data, and if you have access in secret to this type of information this gives you enormous leverage in the marketplace, for example.

It's extraordinary. Just look at the manipulation from just what's been disclosed publicly in terms of Wall Street and over, all over the largest of them we have yet to see anybody actually go to prison at the highest levels. Enormous - you know, it's the whole argument about banks being too big to fail; you know we're seeing incredible amounts of money - the Fed alone with its QE [quantitative easing]. It's pumping massive amounts of money. It's not actually helping the economy as much as it's basically compensating for all the bank losses.

Look at the stock market, I mean this is institutional manipulation at the highest levels of government in collusion with the levers of financial power. It's an extraordinary power and it definitely becomes normalized and institutionalized, a lot of other things, and if you're at the top of the pile, guess what - the pay-offs are enormous.

LS: Yes, and if you have that insider information and, on the other side, you have all that cheap money, you can leverage your bet and it's a safe bet.

TD: Yes, it's a safe bet precisely. I mean, that was part of the joke when the insiders in terms of Wall Street is that, you know, the full faith in credit of the United States was there to prop them up if it all failed. I just find it, I mean, it's like "wow". And ultimately who pays the price? I mean ultimately, in the end, who pays the price? A lot of this was paid by money, but the thing is ultimately there have to be real assets behind it, and when the assets themselves are now being leveraged to the hilt what are you left with? I mean that's, now you don't even have a real economy. It all becomes kind of this virtual thing and the number of people - this has been the 1% as it were. What, to whom, does this benefit go? I always follow the money, who does it benefit?

LS: And towards what end is it used? You talked about power and money, so I think it has to express somehow even though we don't know how it does.

TD: Well, you see the large contours of it already. The effects do show up in the economy. The effects do show up in the impact on just the everyday financial flows. The enormous transactions that course within and between nations and around the globe. This has been the reality of human history - trade within and amongst people - and when you sit at the crossroads, the nexus of this, it's an enormous temptation not just to feed off of it but actually to profit from it and this power - I remember Kissinger said "Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac." I mean, that really kind of puts it in really stark relief …

LS: Yes, and then you have secret power. I mean, this is then the crack version of this aphrodisiac.

TD: Well, you say the crack version, but you get, people get, they mainline it. They get addicted to it because you know something someone doesn't [know], and that's why I call it the currency of power. I know something you don't, which means I have power over you by virtue of having that knowledge, and it allows me an enormous advantage, especially on the world stage or if I'm in agreements or if I'm surveilling you at the G-20 and I know what you're saying in your hotel room or with your staff. That gives me enormous leverage .. if I've got secret information. If I'm inside the banking systems, if I'm truly - I've insider information even though there are all kinds of rules against it, but if I can get away with it in secret and I have the protection of certain powers that be, both government as well as the corporate world, well, my gosh. I mean I'm not, I'm generally not going to limit myself and because it feeds on itself it's never enough.

I'll give you a small example of this and it's where I used to work when I was a manager at Booz Allen Hamilton. I remember being down at headquarters for Booz in northern Virginia and I'm hearing a conversation between two of the partners, the senior executives, and [one] had just gotten his gigantic bonus for the year and he was just contemplating in conversation with his colleague what am I going to spend the money on this year? Is it going to be a new Porsche or is it going to be that new, you know, summer place on the beach, the cottage on the beach. I mean that was the priority because he, I mean that was the priority. This is what happens.

The money is the root of a lot of things. I mean I give people their due in terms of making a profit and a living, but we're talking enormous amounts of money literally at the central levers of power, and when it's done in secret away from the - well away - from the public, away from reporters and journalists. There's a whole lot that I can do and it gives me enormous control over others and ultimately what this is about is its power and control over others.

LS: A lot of this money ends up off-shore. Therefore, do you take those recent off-shores leagues very seriously?

TD: Yes I do, but I think they're desperate to protect it because remember the off-shore accounts are off-shore on purpose because they're "outside" the reach of traditional US or even banking laws because it makes it much, much harder to go after them. Remember they set up these special off-shore mechanisms specifically for the purpose of hiding and shadowing it from other prying eyes so I'm not surprised at all. I mean, there have been whistleblowers with the banking system and yet in some cases the whistleblowers themselves ended up in prison, right? So the banks have an enormous amount to protect and hide.

I smile at all this because it's just, it's kind of the way things are, it's just - I continue to say - at what cost to society at large. Others will say, "Well, hey it's whatever you can get away with and if it's institutionalized and normalized then hey that's the way it is", and you know this kind of power it looks just, let's just be real here. This kind of power doesn't yield willingly; it's just not going to give itself up even when it's exposed.

LS: Does the NSA provide the other 15 US intelligence agencies that are working in other areas the possibilities of information gathering. The background of my question is, it may be true that the NSA does not engage in economic espionage directly. However, if the possibility of information gathering is provided to other agencies which then take care of the economic espionage field the statement of the NSA is true but the information is still ultimately wrong.

TD: Actually I agree. There's one thing. NSA is a technical collection agency. It has no problem collecting information, the real question is what is it using it for? What is it doing with that information and there are arrangements and agreements within the US government for information that comes from NSA's enormous reach and share it for so it can use it for other purpose even though that's not why NSA took it in the first place. On the other hand I will tell you there are secret requirements it would take, it happen to be this particular source of method and you happen to hear it run across this, hey, please tell us. I mean, it happens.

If that happens it's quite routine, so your question is a very loaded question in terms of yes, if you have the information and you're gather it and you acquire it in secret and you can use to your advantage economically or for industrial espionage where you can learn about competitors on the world stage or to leverage your ability to improve your chances on gaining contracts, okay, or simply understanding what others are doing on the world stage economically. Then you will do so because it does give you enormous leverage. The leverage itself wants to know and have that knowledge.

LS: I think you have to guess about this question, but how is NSA intelligence provided to integrated and/or coordinated with the banking operations that are managing government accounts and interventions in the currency, commodity and financial markets, such as the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which is part of the United States Treasury but actually it's hosted at the Federal Reserve of New York.

TD: Well, that's a very tightly coupled arrangement, and the Treasury Department has its own intelligence unit. There is a direct relationship; it's incredibly deep in the shadows. They obviously don't talk about it because we're talking about extraordinarily sensitive information. It's information that not only translates into enormous power but it translates into enormous leverage in terms of billions and trillions of dollars. I mean we're not talking just a few million or even hundreds of millions, we're talking hundreds of billions plus that are routinely affected by decisions that are made and when you have this kind of intelligence it's going to be used, alright.

So, but they don't talk about that, but those arrangements are there. And there are units that share information understand that the funnel point for this [is] within the intelligence apparatus, you know there's like 17 different intelligence agencies [and] one of them is inside the Treasury Department. Remember, you do have that relationship that extends to the Federal Reserve Bank, which by the way is a private entity, it is not, formally, part of the US government. If you actually look at it, it does not have a government frank when it sends out mail, it has its own, but that's a much larger story, though, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.

LS: Yes, it surely is, but as you know Warren Buffett once talked about weapons of financial mass destruction relating to collateralized mortgages. Do you think there are some equivalent weapons of financial mass destruction at the disposal of those forces we are talking about and are they employed?

TD: Yes, you will see like blockades, financial blockades or lots of restrictions placed on trade. Yes, having these instruments of power especially over the flows of financial transactions that course back and forth gives you the ability to effect certain outcomes, and if you decide you want to shape world history then yes, you can withhold, withdraw or invest in ways that have enormous power. I mean money is the life blood, money is such a critical life blood, for finance, it's such a critical life blood of economies, and if you restrict it or expand it depending, and if you marry that to political outcomes,you have, again, the phrase comes to mind, is enormous leverage over, in some cases, over elections or even the way in which certain activities will take place in other countries let alone your own.

Just look at the Wall Street Main Street dichotomy. I mean there is this Occupy Movement. They're just highlighting the fact that you have this incredible redistribution of wealth and what's been collateralized, what was collateralized was the future treasure. You basically collateralized all the assets of the country ... essentially mortgaging your own future,but you collateralized and leverage it on an enormous scale and [if] that's not sufficient then you create your own collateral and then play that game - okay - which is like a Ponzi scheme on steroids at the highest levels of government.

LS: Well, again, some kind of crack version. Is PRISM & Co. just the tip of the iceberg for example in comparison to the DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] project Total Information Awareness, respectively Trusted Information Environment?

TD: Well, let's be reasonable. The Total Information Awareness environment never disappeared. There was a lot of push back, but it was, it went deeper into the shadows, and unfortunately this is typically the way it happens. When a secret program is exposed, particularly that kind of a program, post-9/11 it just goes deeper, and so Prism is one aspect of total information awareness.

 They're not going to call it that. They're not going to stick, you know, a pyramid with an all-seeing eye on it. That was kind of obvious wasn't it, so you make it less obviously and [in] this case you have secret agreements between major Internet service providers that grants NSA either near total access or direct access to just find anything in terms of subscriber information that's resident on the servers, the stored units and facilities of those Internet service providers. When you say "tip of the iceberg", I think there are many, many other arrangements especially the data provider, the data broker business.

These companies, by the way, are not doing this for nothing. They're not doing this because it's to benefit society. They're companies and I always look at this from the dark side. I have to

because of my own experiences and what I endured and the ordeal that I went through.

They're not doing this just because it's for national security. That's partly the argument they already made with the senior executives of those companies which they brought in to provide cover for it, but the reality of it is that they're getting rewarded. They're getting paid.

The surveillance system, the surveillance state is a profit center for them.

So they get to leverage it and they get the leverage and data twice, okay so speaking of fungibility. They get to sell the subscribers their services for monthly fees or contracts and then they get to turn around and provide the same information okay to the government and get the government to pay for it as well and protect them. It's a protection, I mean it's a racket because they have immunity from any law suits that are brought their way, especially class action.

That was, in particular, when legislation was passed to give the telecoms immunity - it was so to avoid having to deal with the potential exposure, obviously real exposure, because subscribers didn't opt in that their data would simply be given over to the government wholesale in secret. So they had to have protection.

LS: The population around the world is more or less completely left in the dark when it comes to espionage by means of electromagnetic radiation and seeing through walls from the outside by means of mobile stationary and air- or space-based systems. Are such things not only technically possible, but are rather common practice nowadays?

TD: Technically possible is an understatement. Yes, I'm certainly aware even from the time I was in NSA there were systems that would allow you to penetrate extraordinary types of surveillance that go far beyond what I call traditional, even in the electronic space, but when you're talking about magnetic scanning systems yes, there's a lot that can be detected. There are specialized vans that do that.

Is it persistent, meaning is it everywhere? No. This technology is still kind of expensive, but where it's employed, yes I can effectively see through walls. It's sort of [like] radar - you have radar, ground penetrating radar; this is the electromagnetic version of that that allows you to basically - I'm familiar with technology that basically when it's directed it can scan for any and all electronic devices.

Let me give you one small example to illustrate what's possible. When I used to live in England, you had to pay, when I used to fly in RC-135s [a large reconnaissance aircraft] - you had to pay [for a license] to listen to a radio [this was abolished in 1971] and watch television. They used to have vans that would drive around to detect whether or not the [TV] antenna was active, meaning it was actively receiving a signal, not transmitting actively receiving a signal and it could do geo-location. ... if it detected an antenna that was actively receiving a signal then they would triangulate, they would find out did you have a license and if you did not have a license then you would be fined. Well take that to a much larger level, where I was aware in the military about equipment that would basically scan systems and it would pick up all, every signature it could find, both passive and active. So, yes it's not just possible, it's actual.

LS: What's your opinion about the drift that the United States have taken in general? I mean, I can imagine that it must be a very painful thing for you.

TD: The drift, oh boy. I'll say it this way. It's probably the starkest way for me to put it. I flew in RC-135s, an electronic warfare aircraft, during the latter years of the Cold War. I was trained as a crypto-linguist. Those voice intercepts as well as electronic intelligence intercepts - so communications and electronics as we would call the business - COMINT, but SIGINT equaled COMINT plus ELIT; communications intelligence plus electronic intelligence.

The target country in which I became an expert over a number of years was East Germany, and I listened in on state-level communications, military communications, you name it, and that was just simply from what we can pick up, alright in many cases using highly specialized equipment that was quite classified. I never imagined, to answer your question even more directly, I never imagined that the template of the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany having the motto to "to know everything", would be used as the playbook by the United States to create the largest surveillance apparatus that the world has ever seen.

I just never imagined it, and I never imagined that I would find myself criminalized by my own government simply because I supported and defended the Constitution and apparently had the naive belief that the idea of the Constitution for all its faults and failures and contradictions, right, that had endured though over 220 years, that somehow the sovereign rights, the inalienable rights of human beings didn't matter when it came to the State wanting to protect me. There is this moral rectitude that the surveillance secrecy regime wraps itself in as did the Stasi.

Remember they were the protectors of the State, that somehow the moral high ground superseded any rights, freedoms or liberties that an individual citizen had, and so when you say the drift, this drift is quite dramatic. This drift is citizens that have rights are now becoming subjects to and of the State in which the State simply regards them as wards of the State, and you get to have privileges that are determined by the State, and you have to continue to prove that as a subject of the State that you are innocent. It's a complete inverse of our Western system of justice.

I just never imagined that I would be having this conversation. Remember I was on the end of a very long stick in which that stick was the crowbar, the stake of national security that the government wanted to drive right through me, brought me out on the comments, the public comments, and say, "Look, this is what happens when you dare hold up a mirror. This is what happens when you dare speak truth to or of power. We will come down on you hard and hammer you good," because you know at one point during their investigation of me - and this is why it's deeply personal I lived this surveillance state. I've lived the physical electronic surveillance. I've lived with the distinct reality that I could have spent many, many decades in prison.

At one point during their investigation they actually, the Chief Prosecutor, this is in 2008, two full years before I was actually indicted. He said, "Mr Drake, how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison unless you co-operate with our investigation." I mean what does that mean? I mean on a deeply individual level that means that I have no life? The State can just take it away because they determine I'm a threat to the State. A threat to the State, why? Because I held up a mirror? That's what happened, and drift means were going down a very slippery slope, and I don't want us to go off into the deep end. I mean, Frank Church, the head of, he was Senator Frank Church.

The Church Committee had an extraordinary series of hearings revealing and disclosing all the abuses of power by the Nixon administration and even before the Nixon administration by previous administrations. He, himself, warned the nation what would happen with the advances in technology if we had to find ourselves in the abyss of a surveillance state, would we be able to pull ourselves back out of it. [3] He left open the question as to whether or not we would.

I don't want to see the dark shadows, secrecy and surveillance becoming the norm. That's not how we want to live as human beings. It means we're going backwards in terms of our own progress in with respect of democracy and freedom and yes, too many, I mean too many, colleagues, too many people I know - remember I'm in a very unique position. Right now of all the prosecutions that have been brought forward by the Obama administration alone, unprecedented in US history, more than all other administration combined, people charged under Espionage Act, are non-spy activities. They are now considered more of a threat to the State than even the traditional spy.

They said that. They said that in my case. They said that I would have the blood of American soldiers on my hands. That what I did, threatened, endangered the lives of American soldiers. They even argued in the court room at my case and they even said this publicly that the whistleblower is a greater threat than traditional spies because traditional spies usually disclose their secrets in secret to another spy or another foreign intelligence operation or agency. When you leak it gets spread across all the newspapers for everybody to see, and that's a greater threat to national security.

So, what is national security has now become the State religion, and you do not question, and that the high priest of secrecy are the rules. I mean what have we come to? I don't want to live in that kind of society. I don't want to be Winston in 1984 cowering in the corner because that was the only place he had any ... where he couldn't be seen by the cameras which meant they knew where he was. I mean I got colleagues right now who are under physical, intimidating physical and electronic surveillance because why? Because the State considers them a threat, and they're trying to send a message.

It's an extraordinary development and there's people more than willing to engage in that conduct, and they're more than willing to worship national security over the sovereignty of individuals. I don't want to live that kind of a life, and that's why I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because it matters to who we are as human beings.

I can stand as a free man. What I meant to say earlier, why am I going on about this. Everybody else has been charged under the Espionage Act or the equivalent. Now, I was the first one. I was the first person, the second, only the second whistleblower - the first was Ellsberg - but I was the first person under the Obama administration charged with espionage. Many others have followed, and yet as I look back I'm right now, other ironically enough, other than Edward Snowden, who's "free in Russia" - how ironic is that, okay? All of the others that have been charged or indicted with espionage are either in jail, okay; or are facing jail, okay; or have been charged with espionage and are facing many, many years in prison.

It's an extraordinary development, and I mean it's not just those charged with espionage; it's all these other related areas ... of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, like Jeremy Hammond, where you flight political activism disclosures of illegal and criminal activity on the part of the government and secret corporations in league with the government and ends up being criminalized, you're being thrown into prison in his case and only pled out because the pressures are enormous.

I know, I was facing many, many decades in prison and part of the leverage that they had is like, "Well, if you plead out Mr Drake maybe you'll only spend 15 years in prison or maybe 12 years or maybe we'll be able to work it where it's only five years." I mean there's a whole history behind how far the government went to destroy me, but I'm here speaking to you as a free human being. Do you know what it means to be able to keep your freedom after the government's spent so many years trying to take that away from you. They mean more to me now than ever.

LS: Whose interests are ultimately served by secret intelligence agencies in the West?

TD: Well, it's become less and less the citizens and has become more and more a protectorate for the powers that be.

LS: Yes, but didn't they set up, for example, the CIA in the first place?

TD: See, I've said this and a lot of people look at me funny and even take exception to it. The real history is, you have to context this crucial to understanding all this. The CIA which, you know its predecessor was OSS, you know the Office of Strategic Services born during World War II.

LS: Which was placed, by the way, in the financial district of New York.

TD: That's correct, that should tell you something and, of course, those links go back even further. I mean the culpability of financial interests are at the center of so much in terms of even modern history. I think modern history, if you go back even into the 19th century, you know it's an extraordinary history to understand it but most people will give it short shift because so much of it is shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Yes, isn't it interesting that the OSS was centered in the financial district. That should tell you something; but that gave them enormous cover for the operations they want to engage in.

Well, out of World War II came the National Security Act in 1947, which created the CIA, it created the Department of Defense, it created the Air Force. Five years later it was followed by a secret directive, still secret to this day, signed by Truman creating the NSA, and so that whole apparatus so closely aligned with the heart and center of power within the United States but politically and financially and economically over time gives that enormous, enormous power and with great power comes great responsibility.

 The problem is, when you enshroud it, wrap it in secrecy, then the opportunities for enormous irresponsibility are there to do. They are there to take place, and that's precisely what's happened, and it's serving private interests - it's clearly not serving public interest.

LS: In that regard, I would encourage our readers to take a look at the professional background of, for example, Clarke Clifford, James Forrestal, Ferdinand Eberstadt, William J Donavon, Allen Dulles, William A Jackson, Frank Wisner, William Casey, Stanley Sporkin, David Dougherty and so on - because they all came from or went to Wall Street. Okay, but this was just an aside. Coming back to my questions, what would you recommend what countries outside the Anglo-American sphere should do in order to cope

with the problems existing through the activities by NSA & Co?

TD: I would separate from them. I really would. I would say, your nations own sovereignty and your citizens have been compromised. You have to assume that. You unfortunately now, even where there are legitimate agreements between governments and even those security services, you cannot trust, you cannot, you just simply cannot because it's gone far beyond the bounds as it were, beyond the bale of agreements that exist for legitimate purposes, in terms of threats to international order and stability, and [I] recognize in saying that I'm saying a lot as an American citizen.

You know can you trust certain providers of, and it's already happening and in fact US companies are now complaining to the Obama administration that the secret agreements and arrangement and the surveillance is causing them to lose business, and that begins to wake people up. Okay, when you start losing business you're unable to compete, or it's increasingly challenging to compete on the international market because others don't trust you. That means you're going to lose business and you're going to lose jobs even when you have international reach. You'll be frozen out.

Increasingly people will go to others, and I'll be asking in those countries - I'd be asking hard questions, and I've said this to many, many reporters and journalists and particularly from Germany, you've got to ask the hard questions of your own government. You've got to ask the hard questions about what your own security services, what are they hiding? What do they know but they don't wish their own public to know.

LS: If I could ask you, what were the most important questions that you would raise to the German government?

TD: I'd ask them to come clean on other than legitimate agreements, the agreements they have between the BND [foreign intelligence agency] for example and NSA. You know the BND has been strangely quiet about all this, they really have. They have a lot to hide. They really do and I, people ask me, "Well, what is it?" I said I don't have direct insight. I'm well aware of agreements, but the agreements I was aware of were legitimate agreements.

We're talking about the other agreements that no one wants to talk about. These are access agreements. These are ones where there's collusion. These are ones in which clearly they would not want German citizens to know precisely how far their own country has been compromised by their own security services. So it's kind of easy, and I say hide behind all their NSA revelations while you remain in the dark.

But I've also said you need whistleblowers from within those security services to come forward and truly to further reveal how far your own rights, they're ostensively protected under the German Constitution, are being violated. But I also understand the paradox because see this is what happened after 9/11. I'm using Germany because I'm more familiar with German history and German politics, and the dynamics going back over 50, 60 years okay.

I'm well aware that Germany itself was declared target number one post-9/11 by NSA for collection and intelligence and surveillance and because there are so many US facilities in Germany it was a platform to be able to do that - both within Germany and using it as a base to conduct other operations outside of Germany - I mean the post-World War II occupation and then ultimately, you know, independence and the, of course, the re-unification with East Germany. You had this - again, it's this paradox, and so NSA chose to make Germany target number one.

I understand because so many of the hijackers of 9/11 lived, transited through or trained in Germany, but I get they needed partnerships and agreements to deal with the threat. It's gone far beyond that. This whole thing [is] in order to know anything about a threat - okay, ostensibly for the purpose of dealing with the threat you have to know everything there is to know and that's available to us, and who cares if some data about some German citizens on a vast scale, millions and millions of Germans, is caught up in that, because hey if they've got nothing to hide they've got nothing to worry about. You're okay. Gee, I used to ... that's, you know, that nothing to hide. Guess who said that? That was Goebbels. That's a quote attributed to Goebbels during the Nazi era.

I just shiver when I hear this because it gives excuse, it gives rise and justification for a national security state mind-set and history is not kind. It just isn't, and we are not immune. I've said this to Americans. We are not immune from what happened in the 1930s. People say, "What a minute Tom, you're an alarmist. We're different. We're America," I said, "Really, are we really that different?"

If you go back even in terms of the Founding Fathers, who were the elite of the day by the way, okay. One of the reasons they want to protect their own, you know, their own minority, they want to protect their own rights. Ironically enough they had to extend those rights to everybody in order to protect their own. Interesting was that in terms of history but if you go back ... there was great concern about what would happen to centralized power. History's not kind. I thought in terms of Western history that you know go back to the Magna Carta. I can't speak to other history in terms of Eastern and other cultures, but I can certainly speak to Western democracy based on, you know, based on Greek democracy in Athens right?

Although a lot of that is shrouded in myth in legend and a lot of it is not true but what about the Magna Carta? You know that was a huge breath of fresh air that the king simply couldn't rule because they said that God said they could, and gave them special dispensation. The serfs and the subjects did have rights, okay. Well we're going backwards. It's somehow because it's national security, wow I guess I never. I mean look - somehow we've turned this terrorism thing into justification because, guess what, meanwhile you have all the other secret stuff going on.

LS: Since you mentioned Joseph Goebbels, we know for sure that he analyzed public relations techniques in the US and it seems a little bit that in turn some people in America have studied his propaganda techniques.

TD: Again, I shudder when I'm going to be responding because I just, I shiver at the reality of the dark side of history from the 20th century.

LS: Sometimes one of the frightening thoughts that I have is that America needs to take a look in the mirror and see that they have become pretty much Nazi-like and what they fought. They have fought, and they [have] become pretty similar to the enemy.

TD: Actually, unfortunately, there's a number of people who actually admire the Nazis. They admire that enormous power, and it's like, well because we're America - I mean, this is the thing that really, really concerns me, that somehow because we're America we have special protection. We are exceptional but that allows us the license, it gives, it grants us license to engage in the very practices the Nuremberg Trials put in stark relief.

I've spoken with one of the lead lawyers on the Nuremberg Trials. It was an extraordinary conversation over many hours. I just never imagined that here we are engaging in the equivalent. Somehow, you know, I'm just following orders. That's the very thing that I took exception to, was orders. Somehow the orders took priority over rule of law, and then rule of law got corrupted by passing and enabling that legislation, like article 48 [which allowed the president, under certain circumstances, to take emergency measures without the prior consent of the Reichstag] in the Weimar Republic.

The history here is really unnerving, and that somehow we're immune to that. We're not immune at all. We're not and you're already seeing a police state, a virtual. I've called, I've said a digital fence already surrounds us.

We saw the physical wall of East Germany to keep people in, right? Well, we already have a digital fence that tracks us. I'll just give you an example of this, Lars: When I go home I often go home from the beltway around Washington DC. I head north on Route 29 and the main intersection just north of the beltway. When I first started going that way I would just see all these, what would appear to be random flashes at the intersection. It dawned on me shortly thereafter that was no random flashes. Those are simply cameras taking pictures of license plates, 24/7 365, and there's many, many of those cameras set-up all around DC.

What does it mean to be tracked and monitored like this? I mean ultimately it's about control, about social control. It's about knowing where people are anytime you want to know about them. I don't want to live in that kind of a society because it has an extraordinary corrosive effect, yet the technology is benign.

It's always about what do you use it for, right? Those cameras aren't there to detect red-light violators, you know running red lights. It's simply to take pictures of license plates. I didn't opt in, but I guess the license plate is public because I can actually see it on the car. So if I'm not in public then its fair game, but what am I doing with that information? See it comes back to what do I do with the information, and if we don't stand up for, you know, people - a vacuum is created. If you don't stand up for your sovereign rights, there are those who will take them away from you and they love having power.

It's a pathological condition when you actually derive pleasure from having power over others. You will use power. You will turn, you will manipulate. You will turn them into subjects and objects of your attention. That's not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That means you're now subject to and subject of somebody else and the last time I checked in human history it's a form of slavery or indentured servant or a serf.

LS: A lot of talk is going on in your country about socialism. I think this is a very phony discussion, because wouldn't you agree with me that it's time to smell the coffee and talk about fascism in the US?

TD: Actually, that's the word ... Anytime I used it, when I use the word "fascism" people cringe. They don't even want to go there. Even when the overwhelming evidence says that we actually have a virtual fascist government that has extraordinary ties to Wall Street, the financial banking sector and large major corporations on a truly extraordinary scale. It's a full argument, the "socialism" thing is foe. There are people I know in my extended networks that are progressives; unfortunately they're not stopping to smell the coffee because the face of fascism is - it's not a pleasant thing to look at because that means you're looking in the mirror.

LS: And you [the United States] have fought the fascists in World War II.

TD: Yes, we sure did. I mean, my own father fought in World War II, and I see one of the silver linings of my own case - I did plead out to a minor misdemeanor for exceeding authorized use for a computer. I had community service for 240 hours. I interviewed almost 50 veterans of World War II to the present day and the World War II veterans feared for the future of our republic. They do, and they said, "Geez, everything I fought against in World War II, was it in vain?" Some of them are actually asking that question that we're becoming the very thing that we fought against.

LS: Well, it was said that the next time fascism comes, it comes in the form of anti-fascism. [4]

TD: Usually it does and wrapped in the robes of moral rectitude and patriotism.

Sources
1. Compare Jason Leopold: "Revealed: NSA pushed 9/11 as key 'sound bite' to justify surveillance", published here.
2. Regarding the Echelon Interception System, see for example this report of the European Parliament that was published on July 11, 2001, here.
3. US Senator Frank Church said in 1975: "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
4. It was the Italian author Ignazio Silone who said that if fascism would come back, it wouldn't say: "I am fascism"; it would say: "I am anti-fascism."


Lars Schall is a German financial journalist.

(Copyright 2013 Lars Schall)

All in play in the New Great Game

  Middle East

     Dec 23, '13

THE ROVING EYE
All in play in the New Great Game
By Pepe Escobar

The big story of 2014 will be Iran. Of course, the big story of the early 21st century will never stop being US-China, but it's in 2014 that we will know whether a comprehensive accord transcending the Iranian nuclear program is attainable; and in this case the myriad ramifications will affect all that's in play in the New Great Game in Eurasia, including US-China.

As it stands, we have an interim deal of the P5+1 (the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany) with Iran, and no deal between the US and Afghanistan. So, once

again, we have Afghanistan configured as a battleground between Iran and the House of Saud, part of a geopolitical game played out in overdrive since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 along the northern rim of the Middle East all the way to Khorasan and South Asia.

Then there's the element of Saudi paranoia, extrapolating from the future of Afghanistan to the prospect of a fully "rehabilitated" Iran becoming accepted by Western political/financial elites. This, by the way, has nothing to do with that fiction, the "international community"; after all, Iran was never banished by the BRICS, (ie Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Non-Aligned Movement and the bulk of the developing world.

Those damned jihadis
Every major player in the Barack Obama administration has warned Afghan President Hamid Karzai that either he signs a bilateral "security agreement" authorizing some ersatz of the US occupation or Washington will withdraw all of its troops by the end of 2014.

Wily puppet Karzai will milk this for all it's worth - as in extracting hardcore concessions. Yet, whatever happens, Iran will maintain if not enlarge its sphere of influence in Afghanistan. This intersection of Central and South Asia is geopolitically crucial for Iranian to project power, second only to Southwest Asia (what we call the "Middle East").

We should certainly expect the House of Saud to keep using every nasty trick available to the imagination of Saudi Arabia's Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush, to manipulate Sunnis all across AfPak with a target of, essentially, preventing Iran from projecting power.

But Iran can count on a key ally, India. As Delhi accelerates its security cooperation with Kabul, we reach the icing on the Hindu Kush; India, Iran and Afghanistan developing their southern branch of the New Silk Road, with a special niche for the highway connecting Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar (Afghanistan meets the Indian Ocean).

So watch out for all sorts of interpolations of an Iran-India alliance pitted against a Saudi-Pakistani axis. This axis has been supporting assorted Islamists in Syria - with nefarious results; but because Pakistan has also been engulfed in appalling violence against Shi'ites, Islamabad won't be too keen to be too closely aligned with the House of Saud in AfPak.

Washington and Tehran for their part happen to be once more aligned (remember 2001?) in Afghanistan; neither one wants hardcore jihadis roaming around. Even Islamabad - which for all practical purposes has lost all its leverage with the Taliban in AfPak - would like jihadis to go up in smoke.

All these players know that any number of remaining US forces and swarms of contractors will not fill the power vacuum in Kabul. The whole thing is bound to remain murky, but essentially the scenario points to the Central-South Asia crossroads as the second-largest geopolitical - and sectarian - battleground in Eurasia after the Levantine-Mesopotamian combo.

Zero energy from our neighbor?
As much as India, Iraq is also in favor of a comprehensive deal with Iran. And to think that Iran and Iraq might have been engaged in a silent nuclear arms race with one another at the end of the last century, just for Baghdad now to fiercely defend Tehran's right to enrich uranium. Not to mention that Baghdad depends on Iran for trade, electricity and material help in that no-holds-barred war against Islamists/Salafi-jihadis.

Turkey also welcomes a comprehensive agreement with Iran. Turkey's trade with Iran has nowhere to go but up. The target is US$30 billion by 2015. More than 2,500 Iranian companies have invested in Turkey. Ankara cannot possibly support Western sanctions; it makes no business sense. Sanctions go against its policy of expanding trade. Moreover, Turkey depends on inexpensive natural gas imported from Iran.

After deviating wildly from its previous policy of "zero problems with our neighbors", Ankara is now waking up to the business prospect of Syrian reconstruction. Iraq may help, drawing from its oil wealth. Energy-deprived Turkey can't afford to be marginalized. A re-stabilized Syria will mean the go-ahead for the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline. If Ankara plays the game, an extension could be in the cards - fitting its self-proclaimed positioning as a privileged Pipelineistan crossroads from East to West.

The bottom line is that the Turkish-Iranian conflict over the future of Syria pales when compared with the energy game and booming trade. This points to Ankara and Tehran increasingly converging into finding a peaceful solution in Syria.

But there's a huge problem. The Geneva II conference on January 22 may represent the nail in the coffin of the House of Saud's push to inflict regime change on Bashar al-Assad. Once again, this implies that Bandar Bush is ready to go absolutely medieval - plowing the whole spectrum of summary executions, beheadings, suicide and car bombings and all-out sectarianism all along the Iraqi-Syrian-Lebanese front.

At least there will be a serious counterpunch; as Sharmine Narwani outlines here, the former "Shi'ite crescent" - or "axis of resistance" - is now reconstituting itself as a "security arc" against Salafi-jihadis. Pentagon conceptualizers of the "arc of instability" kind never thought about that.

Missile nonsense, anyone?
Adults in Washington - not exactly a majority - may have already visualized the fabulous derivatives of a Western deal with Iran by examining China's approval and the possibility of future Iranian help to stabilize Afghanistan.

For China, Iran is a matter of national security - as a top source of energy (plus all those myriad cultural affinities between Persians and Chinese since Silk Road times). Threatening a country to which the US owes over $1 trillion with third-party, Department of the Treasury sanctions for buying Iranian oil seems to be off the cards, at least for now.

As for Moscow, by coming with a diplomatic resolution to the chemical weapons crisis in Syria, Vladimir Putin no less than saved the Obama administration from itself, as it was about to plunge into a new Middle Eastern war of potentially cataclysmic consequences. Immediately afterwards, the door was opened for the first breach since 1979 of the US-Iran Wall of Mistrust.

Crucially, after the Iranian nuclear interim deal was signed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went for the jugular; the deal cancels the need for NATO's ballistic missile defense in Central Europe - with interceptor bases in Romania and Poland set to become operational in 2015 and 2018, respectively. Washington has always insisted on the fiction that this was designed to counter missile "threats" from Iran.

Without the Iranian pretext, the justification for ballistic missile defense is unsustainable.

The real negotiation starts more-or-less now, in early 2014. Logically the endgame by mid-2014 would be no more sanctions in exchange for close supervision of Iran's nuclear program. Yet this is a game of superimposed obfuscations. Washington sells itself the myth that this is about somewhat controlling the Iranian nuclear program, an alternative plan to an ultra high-risk Shock and Awe strike to annihilate vast swathes of Iranian infrastructure.

No one is talking, but it's easy to picture BRICS heavyweights Russia and China casually informing Washington what kind of weaponry and material support they would offer Iran in case of an American attack.

Tehran, for its part, would like to interpret the tentative rapprochement as the US renouncing regime change, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei paying the price of trading elements of a nuclear program for the end of sanctions.

Assuming Tehran and Washington are able to isolate their respective confrontational lobbies - a titanic task - the benefits are self-evident. Tehran wants - and badly needs - investment in its energy industry (at least $200 billion) and other sectors of the economy. Western Big Oil is dying to invest in Iran. The economic opening will inevitably be part of the final agreement - and for Western turbo-capitalism this is a must; a market of 80 million largely well-educated people, with fabulous location, and swimming in oil and gas. [1] What's not to like?

Peacemaker or just a trickster?
Tehran supports Assad in large part to combat the jihadi virus - incubated by wealthy sponsors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. So whatever the spin in Washington, there's no possibility of a serious solution for Syria without involving Iran. The Obama administration now seems to realize that Assad is the least bad among unanimously bad options. Who would have bet on it only three months ago?

The interim deal with Iran is the first tangible evidence that Barack Obama is actually considering leaving his foreign policy mark in Southwest Asia/Middle East. It helps that the 0.00001% who run the show may have realized that a US president globally perceived as a dancing fool engenders massive instability in the Empire and all its satrapies.

The bottom line is that Obama needs to respect his partner Hassan Rouhani - who has made clear to the Americans he must secure non-stop political backing by Khamenei; that's the only way to sideline the very powerful religious/ideological lobby in Tehran/Qom against any deal with the former "Great Satan". So "Great Satan" needs to negotiate in good faith.

A realpolitik old hand (with a soft heart) would say that the Obama administration is aiming at a balance of power between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

A more Machiavellian realpolitik old hand would say this is about pitting Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arabs versus Persians, to keep them paralyzed.

Perhaps a more prosaic reading is that the US as a mob protector is no more. As much as everyone is aware of a powerful Israel lobby and an almost as powerful Wahhabi petrodollar lobby in Washington, it's never discussed that neither Israel nor the House of Saud have a "protector" other than the US.

So from now on, if the House of Saud sees Iran as a threat, it will have to come up with its own strategy. And if Israel insists on seeing Iran as an "existential threat" - which is a joke - it will have to deal with it as a strategic problem. If a real consequence of the current shift is that Washington will not fight wars for Saudi or Israeli sake anymore, that's already a monumental game changer.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin see it is in their interest to "protect" peacemaker Obama. And yet everyone remains on slippery territory; Obama as peacemaker - this time really honoring his Nobel Prize - may be just a mirror image. And Washington could always march towards regime change in Tehran led by the next White House tenant after 2016.

For 2014 though, plenty of signs point to a tectonic shift in the geopolitical map of Eurasia, with Iran finally emerging as the real superpower in Southwest Asia over the designs of both Israel and the House of Saud. Now that's (geopolitical) entertainment. Happy New Year.

Note:
1. Iran Deal Opens Door for Businesses, Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2013.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)